The various recent experiments and studies have revealed that there was a need to promote of study skills that transition students from reading to learning. My feeling is that with an excessive use of tabs, smart boards, laptops, videos, power-point presentation, workbooks, worksheets and work-cards reading levels of students have suffered badly.

The
studies have almost conclusively proved that listening, speaking, and
watching hardly result into learning since they do not provide any
scope for slow effortful cognitive functions since they are such fast
moving actions that beat the mind.

In
Focus

Reading
with purpose and intent to summarize and paraphrase as parts of
classroom processes once children have acquired reading skills, a
switch over needs to be taken up read-to-learn skills. It can be
initiated with exemplar and demystification of the process followed
by handing over the process to learners.

The
experiment of compensatory education at grade ten rural girls in
Rajasthan by Centre for Unfolding Learning Potentials (CULP) and
special education trainees by Disha in Jaipur reveal that it the
reading habit for purposeful learning can be developed by
systematically introducing summarizing skill, vocabulary building
word-puzzles and paraphrasing skill using identified keywords after
reading.

At
the school level, both lectures and electronic devices distract and
retard learning since they make students cognitively passive. So much
so, the presence of electronic devices and inert lectures are being
termed as the 'negative externalities' in the process of learning
with analysis and codification of constructed knowledge and its
revisit through reading.

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